Our Mission

Crestleaf was built to enable people all over the world to capture, preserve and share their family story with living relatives and future generations.

The Crestleaf Story

We all seem to have a natural sense of wonder that drives us to know more about our family history. This curiosity has led many of us on a journey where we’ve learned more about ourselves and our family than we ever imagined possible. This quest can be such an immersive experience -- one in which we often find ourselves getting swept away -- spending hours researching and capturing our family history. We’re sure you can relate!

And so the story begins...

Crestleaf is run by a small, diverse team spread across the United States. Several of us live in Ohio, while others call California home. Despite the great distances between where we live, we're united by two common threads - our love of family and our desire to harness technology to improve our lives. Our family backgrounds are quite diverse, and we all wanted a way to capture our unique histories. Sadly, we couldn't find an adequate solution. This frustration drove us to create Crestleaf - a better way to capture, preserve and share your family's story.

Over the last several decades, technology has dramatically improved the genealogy industry. Historical records are being digitized at an unprecedented rate. This amazing trend has provided us all with the ability to uncover distant relatives that we never knew existed. We can now build a beautiful family tree online and share it with our relatives anytime, anywhere. Over the years, we've also seen dramatic improvements in the technology that allows us to scan and upload old family photos. Yet, all of these individual advances seemed to solve just one single piece of a much larger puzzle.

As we looked to these new tools to capture our family history, we realized that something was missing. It wasn't obvious at first - But the link became more clear with time.

As we ventured further along on our individual quests to capture our own family's storie, we realized that none of these new tools seemed to capture the human within each of us. The tools lacked emotion... they all seemed to miss one important detail - the story.

When we leaf through old family photos or think back on a laugh we shared with distant cousins at a family reunion - it always seems to bring back deep emotions. We wanted a way to share these emotions... to share the story behind the photos and all of the laughs we enjoyed so long ago.

These moments, these feelings, these stories are what define a family. As we get older, our memories fade and we forget to share our family experiences with our children and grandchildren. We believe that these memories are far too important to simply fade away. Family stories are meant to be passed on so that future generations can understand their unique history and carry on the legacy. This is why we built Crestleaf and this is what drives us to make it better every single day.

What We Believe:

We believe that you have a right to discover your relatives for free. These are records of your relatives. And, we don’t think you should have to pay to access them. That’s why we provide full access to more than 90 Million genealogy records. They’re completely free, for everyone.

We believe in privacy. Our historic genealogy records come from public sources. So, we leave them available to the public. But, the family tree you create and the information you add are all completely private. You can invite relatives to collaborate with you on the same tree. Or, you can make it public to others. But, it’s completely your choice.

We believe in the preservation of memories and stories. We want our future generations to know where they came from.

More than anything, we want to provide everybody with the opportunity to capture their memories before they fade. We want to provide everybody with the opportunity to share their family story with future generations. Leave your legacy.